Twin Cities Blackmoor (1973? - 1976)

My recollection is that we played out the original Valley of the Ancients adventure sometime during the 1973-74 school year or it might have been the following summer as we had moved our gaming from Dave's basement to St. Thomas College by that time and that was where we were when we played that adventure out. I moved away to Mankato in the Fall of '74, so it should have been before that.

My recollection of the geography is a bit fuzzy. What I remember is that the Valley of the Ancients was southwest of Blackmoor, which basically fits where it is in the current maps; but I don't remember much of the details of the other geography in that direction. The geography south of Blackmoor has been radically altered from the original setting to keep it compatable with the varous settings Blackmoor has been placed in since then.

This is about what I remember. My character Robert the Bald started in Blackmoor and ended up in the area called The Dragon hills on the present maps. At the time there were no Dragon Hills and the Valley of the Ancients seemed to be further away. It was just a wilderness that we had to explore. Perhaps I was just relocated closer when the present maps were made.

In the "Twin Cities Era" you refer to the game as being "Chainmail and pre-OD&D". I am probably out of touch with current thinking on these things, but we were using much of what was in those three little books long before they were published.

We had a player (Bill Heaton) advance a level in the very first adventure. There were only three levels at the time: flunky, hero and super hero. We were all flunkies at the start. He became a hero when he mastered the magic sword we found during the adventure. I don't remember when the level advancement became one level per new hit dice and we were never really sure how far along we were in getting to the next level, Dave kept track of our experince and let us know when we moved up.

Because you died when you were hit in Chainmail, we were using damage dice, hit dice and armor classes within about a month of our starting to play Blackmoor (winter of 1970-71). Dave Arneson told me he based the armor class system on an American Civil War Ironclad game, although I can not tell you what game it was at this point, though.

I don't remember exactly when we starting rolling for our character attributes (str, dex, con, int, wis & appearance rather than chrisma, as I recall), but it was before the summer of 1972, because I remember using them at that time. We were only using two d6 so the range was only 2-12, however. We didn't have our own character sheets. Instead, Dave kept an index card on each of us with our stats, experience and possessions. We had the card during the gaming session, but we returned it at the end of the game.

I think that the the only time we used pure Chainmail after the first few weeks was when we were doing mass battles. Even then we adjusted it to use the damage dice and hit points for each PC, so it was not really pure Chainmail anymore.

It seems to me that the transition from our home game with Dave's rules to play testing the OD&D rules was a pretty minor transition. Hardly noticable...